Posted on 06/04/2014 9:51:45 PM PDT by boatbums
Almost 800 babies and children were buried in a mass grave in Ireland near a home for unmarried mothers run by nuns, according to new research Wednesday which throws more light on the Irish Catholic Church's troubled past.
Death records suggest 796 children, from newborns to eight-year-olds, were deposited in a grave near a Catholic-run home for unmarried mothers during the 35 years it operated from 1925 to 1961.
Historian Catherine Corless, who made the discovery, says her study of death records for the St Mary's home in Tuam in County Galway suggests that a former septic tank near the home was a mass grave.
The septic tank, full to the brim with bones, was discovered in 1975 by locals when concrete slabs covering the tank broke up.
Until now, locals believed the bones mainly stemmed from the Great Irish famine of the 1840s when hundreds of thousands perished.
St Mary's, run by the Bons Secours Sisters, was one of several such 'mother and baby' homes in early 20th century Ireland.
Thousands of unmarried pregnant women -- labelled at the time as 'fallen women' -- were sent to the homes to have their babies.
The women were ostracised by the conservative-Catholic society and were often forced to hand over their children for adoption.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Fair enough — if the facts are misstated, so be it. But the defense of it I was responding to was horrific.
I understand your condemnations. But having been raised in an Irish-American family, I have learned over the decades to see the harsh emotional behavior of the past's ignorant Irish poor as a cultural phenomenon that did not result from Catholic theology, but became entwined with Irish institutional Catholicism, because few other kinds of people except the poor and ignorant were available in post-famine Ireland. Few of us on FR have ever lived in a culture of multi-generational grinding poverty and ignorance, punctuated only by the often baffling rituals and intervention of the England-persecuted RC church in Ireland.
While we would like to judge the past by today's standards, and foreign nations by American standards, it's not really fair to do so. As conservatives, we are often accused by the left in this country of having personally set out to give diseases to American Indians, to enjoy slavery instead of tolerating it with restrictions against a backdrop of fierce opposition that almost destroyed any hope of a Constitution, and to have whipped every slave rather than care for them as we would a good horse, given that an adult male slave cost $2000 in 1845 money. We are daily characterized as haters of homosexuals and women, of wanting to create a theocracy -- and if we did establish a Christian theocracy, it would be utterly indistinguishable from the intents and practices of the Taliban.
Surely you can see that while there are regrettable elements of truth in every shocking discovery of tragic events of the past, the whole truth lies in between what we think we would do today and what the propagandists are saying about the yesterday whose influences they are determinedly trying to eliminate.
As conservatives, we experience what it is like to be slimed by propaganda and to have hate directed at us and violence incited against us on a daily basis -- while the left accuses us of hating and inciting violence against them when we report facts instead of emotional polemics. I have counter-demonstrated at leftist anti-war rallies on the National Mall that left hundreds of thousands of pieces of litter behind on the grass and streets for the taxpayers to pick up; and I have partipated in many conservative events on the National Mall such as the first gigantic Tea Party rally in 2009 after which the only trash to be found was piled neatly around the very few trash cans provided, because the Tea Party was prejudged to be so potentially violent that the Park Service had removed most of the trashcans. They were convinced that small-government zealots in colonial costumes would pick up trashcans and use them to bash -- who or what, exactly? The police? The windows of the Capitol Building? Nothing could have been further from the truth.
What has always been true is that "a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can put its pants on in the morning." The rehashing of the worst possible interpretation of this tragic Tuam story is but the latest chapter in a worldwide campaign by leftist useful media idiots to carry water for the internationalist secular socialists who stand to profit from taking the hope of Christ away from the people. Magnifying the horror and minimizing any mitigating elements of any Christian scandal serves their purposes -- the more rabidly emotional, the better.
Not every human error born of poverty and desperation such as Tuam is as intentional or horrific as the highly profitable Gosnells, illegal-worker traffickers, "educational" pornographers and sex-slavers of today who go unremarked.
None of us were there.
Excellent post. Thank you.
Can I add juvenile as an option?
I certainly see your point. But I disagree. My cruel Irish-American mother used theology to beat me up daily to the extent that I could not believe there was someone named Jesus until I was 40. Poverty had nothing to do with it; I went to the best Catholic schools from nursery school thru the uni, and we lived a block from the president of General Motors. Our social life was exemplary, but at home I was condemned to hell daily for things like not eating my tomatoes. "God will punish you for that," and "You're going to hell," were her most common expressions. Pretty harsh way to raise an innocent little girl. So, I have no difficulty whatsoever in believing in the intentional --and sneaky --cruelty of Catholics.
May God rest their souls. All of them.
I say this having grown up among Irish Catholics and then moved in adulthood to a working class Italian Catholic community where the contrast could not have been more striking. The Italians were warm, affectionate, solicitous, generous, sensual -- in other words, the polar opposite of the working class Irish. So Catholicism per se could not have been the culprit. Then I began reading history and found out how the Irish poor had suffered.
May I recommend The Great Shame by Thomas Keneally, for starters. He also wrote the play on which the movie Schindler's List was based.
Where do you draw the line between the “none of us were there” and the common standards of decent known to humans for thousands of years? At what level of convenient do you shrug? And I do mean you - I am not a collectivist-conservative, and I bristle when someone tried to lump me in with the “conservative we.” In fact, a hallmark of American conservatism is a specific rejection of collective justification of anything.
One more thing. I come from a family with roots in coal mining Irish Roman Catholicism that had very little money or formal education. Yet I struggle to think of even one who would know what YOU mean by “Irish Institutional Catholicism” vs “Catholic theology.” But I am CERTAIN they would interpret it as you telling them that they were to stupid to even understand their own religious beliefs or their current political situation.
And just between you and me, it’s lucky for you that they’re dead and buried, and you’re nottelling them that to their faces.
Because I think you might have found them a bit too ignorant and backwards to comprehend your good will.
After all, if they can’t tell the difference between a funeral and a graveyard, compared to a septic tank, how are they going to be able to tell the difference between your teeth and their fists?
Oh, did I mention your insufferable arrogance? Don’t let me forget.
How distant was this past?
The people doing it are largely the WWII people and some of them possibly still alive since 1940 isn’t so long ago.
Many, if not most Catholic nations are known as cruel places, our southern border is the entrance into about 20 of them including the most Catholic nations on earth.
What an excellent response! Thank you.
Irish verbal abuse: your post is a case in point.
For the record, Catholic theology is that canon of belief developed and upheld by the scholars of the Vatican's magisterium and reflected in its catechism. "Institutional" in this context meant how the religion was practiced on a daily basis under the leadership of a given culture. As you may know, various ethnicities of Catholics include strains of folklore and other cultural characteristics in their churches. That is why Catholic practices in South America differ from those in Ireland, without regard to the theology.
But I am CERTAIN they would interpret it as you telling them that they were to stupid to even understand their own religious beliefs or their current political situation.
There is a difference between ignorance and stupidity. Some of the most intelligent people alive can still be ignorant in the sense of not having had the means or exposure to a worldview any wider than whatever was available in their village. Before mass communications and electronics, most of the world's level of ignorance was determined by whatever degree of local poverty existed. As Frank McCourt illustrated in Angela's Ashes, poverty is not a sin. Cultural poverty is no reflection on the native intelligence of individuals, as was demonstrated by the rapid fluorishing of the Potato Famine immigrants in America.
It may be hard to imagine, but many middle class areas of the UK, even in northern England, did not have indoor plumbing the first time I visited there in the late 1960s. I could not get a decent shower or make a convenient phone call in a middle-class area of Naples in 1990. And few countries on earth ever reached the level of creature comfort for most citizens that we who are alive today experienced in the United States. When countries are poorer, so are their choices and their behaviors under stress. Therefore it is, I restate, unfair to try to make a direct comparison without all the facts.
There is a post on another thread that gives more detail about this case: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3163197/posts?page=101#101
In 1960 America, almost 17% of homes had no indoor bathroom and 7% had no running water.
This scandal of possibly 800 children’s bodies being pitched into a septic tank needs to be investigated, and all your writing and efforts to distract won’t change that.
Nor did anything I write attempt to stand in the way of an investigation. An investigation, not an anti-Catholic witchhunt.
Excellent points. Frankly the standards of yesterday were the poor were buried in unmarked graves (potters fields), and often stacked on top of each other.
An anti-Catholic witch hunt?
This historian only uncovered this recently, this is justifiably a big story and people’s shock and outrage will hopefully result in forcing an investigation of this Catholic institution.
Regardless of what indoor plumbing was like in the the 1960s.
Kindly make the distinction between a thorough search for the facts in Tuam and the avid anti-Catholicism that leapt onto the historian’s research both in Ireland and on this Forum. The former is a necessary and appropriate response. The latter is prejudice and bigotry.
Man, have you directed you energies in the wrong direction.
Darlin’, I am a woman. And I am not a Catholic. I am a lifelong student of human behavior, starting with an Ivy graduate degree from many years ago. And I am old, having lived a long time and studied quite a lot. I do not post my opinions lightly nor form them out of thin air, but research them from many sources.
Just so you know.
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